Part 1 (1/2)

The Romance of a Great Store.

by Edward Hungerford.

Introduction

”Caveat emptor,” the Romans said, in their day.

”Let the Buyer beware,” we would read that phrase, today.

For nearly four thousand years, perhaps longer, _caveat emptor_ ruled the hard world of barter. Yet for the past sixty years, or thereabouts, a new principle has come into merchandising. You may call it progress, call it idealism, call it ethics, call it what you will. I simply call it good business.

_Caveat emptor_ has become a phrase thrust out of good merchandising. It is a pariah. The decent merchant of today despises it. On the contrary he prides himself upon the honor of his calling, upon the high value of his good name, untarnished. The man or the woman who comes into his store may come with the faith or the simplicity of the child. He or she may even be bereft of sight, itself--yet deal in faith and fearlessly.

_Caveat emptor_ is indeed a dead phrase.

How and whence came this murder of a commercial derelict?

You may laugh and at first you may scoff, but the fact remains that the development of the department store as we know it in the United States today first began some sixty or sixty-five years ago. And almost coincidently began the development of a code of morals in merchandising such as was all but undreamed of in this land, at any rate up to a decade or two before the coming of the Civil War. Not that there were no honest merchants in those earlier days of the republic. Oh no, there was a plenty of them--men whose integrity and whose sincerity were as little to be doubted as are those same qualities in our best merchants of today. Only yesterday these honest men were in the minority. The moral code in merchandising was yet inchoate, unformed.

It might remain unformed, intangible today if it had not been for the coming of the department store. The enormous consolidation and concentration that went to make these enterprises possible brought with them a compet.i.tion--bitter and to the end unflinching--which hesitated at no legitimate means for the gaining of its end. But compet.i.tion quickly found that the best means--the finest battle-sword--was honest commercial practice, and so girded that sword to its belt and bade _caveat emptor_ begone.

The great department store around which these chapters are written a.s.sumes for itself, neither yesterday, today nor tomorrow, any monopoly of this virtue of commercial honesty. But it does a.s.sert, and will continue to a.s.sert that it was at least among the pioneers in the complete banishment of _caveat emptor_, that its founder--the man whose name it so proudly bears today--fought for these high principles when the fighting was at the hardest and the temptations to move in the other direction were most alluring.

Of these principles you shall read in the oncoming chapters of this book. There are many, they are varied--in some respects they vary greatly from those upon which other and equally successful and equally honest merchandising establishments are today operated. Macy's has no quarrel with any of its compet.i.tors. It merely writes upon the record that, for itself, it is quite satisfied with the merchandising principles that its founder and the men who came after him saw fit to establish. Upon those the store has prospered--and prospered greatly.

And because of such prosperity--social as well as commercial--because it feels that its selling principles are quite as valuable to its patrons as to the store itself, it has no intention of giving change to them.

Macy's of today is like in soul and spirit to Macy's of yesterday; Macy's of tomorrow is planned to be like unto the Macy's of today--only vastly larger in its scope and influence.

For the convenience of the reader this book has been divided into three great parts, or books. Time has formed the logical factor of division.

Time, as in the theater, forms these three books, or acts--Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. They move in sequence. The stage-hands are placing the setting for the New York of yesterday--the New York that already has begun to fade, far from the eyes of even the oldest of the humans who shall come to read these pages. It is a charming New York, this American city of the late 'fifties, the city whose ladies go shopping in hoopskirts and in crinoline. It has dignity, taste, bustle, enterprise.

But anon of these. The stage is set. The director's foot comes stamping down upon the boards. The curtain rises. The first act begins.

_Yesterday_

I. The Ancestral Beginnings of Macy's

Interwoven into the history of the ancient island of Nantucket are the names and annals of some of the earliest of our American families--the Coffins, the Eldredges, the Myricks, and the Macys. Their forbears came from England to America fully ten generations ago. They settled upon the remote and wind-swept isle and there to this day many of their descendants ply their vocations and have their homes.

In the beginning the vocation of these settlers was found to lie almost invariably upon a single path; and that path led down to the sea. They were sea-faring folk, those early residents of Nantucket: G.o.d-fearing, simple of speech and of action, yet mentally keen and alert. And from them sprang the segment of a race which was soon to grow far beyond the narrow barriers of the little island and to spread its splendid enthusiasm and energy far into a newborn land.

Among the very earliest of these Nantucket settlers was one Thomas Macy, who, from the beginning, took his fair place in the development of its fis.h.i.+ng and its whaling industries. From him came a long line of descendants--a clean and st.u.r.dy record--and in the eighth generation of these there was born--on August 29, 1822--as the son of John and Eliza Myrick Macy, the man whose name chiefly concerns this book--Rowland Hussey Macy.